


dawn will follow after all of our strife

by statusquo_ergo



Series: a fire in the sage's mansion [6]
Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Fix-It, Fluffy Ending, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-09 01:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15256662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: If he's really so happy with the way things are, why does Mike keep having such terrible dreams about the life he left behind?Five times Mike has a nightmare and calls Harvey to calm himself down, and one time he doesn't have to have the nightmare first.





	dawn will follow after all of our strife

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: I wish you would write a fic where Mike has bad dreams about Harvey, like losing him or something like that. Mike probably has left already but can’t stop thinking about how everyone is doing, specially Harvey. Maybe he would get so worried and shaken because of the dream(s) that he calls Harvey in the middle of the night?
> 
> Thanks to [FrivolousSuits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits) for the idea to make this a 5+1! (Please check out her fic [Come On Back to Paradise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13829607)!)

**_I_ **

A freezing wind sweeps around Mike’s body, tossing the quarters of his jacket up and fixing his pants to the backs of his thighs; how he knows the wind is freezing, he isn’t sure, being that he no longer seems capable of telling cold from hot, hard from soft, sour from sweet, but he does, absolutely, and he’d rather like to be out of it.

The coffee cart on the corner is awfully familiar. He might stop by if anyone was working there, but no; the streets are quite devoid of human life.

A monolith of glass and steel looms overhead, casting a bottomless shadow that seems to be going out of its way to meet him where he stands, tucked underneath his feet and caught on the sole of his shoes. Scuffing his heel against the pavement, Mike drags the shadow with him toward the doors and looks up at the dim façade, at the bright lights shining out of only a single window on a very high floor.

Dozens of faceless men and women in black suits and grey ties bustle about the lobby with their heads lowered as they go out of their way to ignore everything going on around them, and Mike mustn’t touch any of them.

“Excuse me,” he says, dodging left and right as he dances toward the elevator in the corner. “Sorry.”

Their shuffling footsteps don’t make a noise so much as put an echo in his ears, a sudden pressure change, and Mike rakes his hand through his hair and squeezes his eyes shut as though it’ll make a difference; when he opens them again, the crowds have vanished, but Harvey stands in their place by the reception desk of Specter Litt with his nose buried in a file about a thousand pages thick.

“Harvey,” Mike breathes, hurrying toward him. “Something seriously weird is going on; there’s no one outside and I don’t…recognize, anything…”

Harvey doesn’t bother looking up until he’s finished reading the very last page, eighteen hours passed by in an instant.

“Do you have an appointment?” he asks coolly, his eyes hooded and dark.

“No, I— Harvey, what are you talking about?”

Harvey sneers as he envisions all the ways he’s going to enjoy eviscerating him and Mike, unable to decide whether to rush to him or run away, remains paralyzed where he stands, the world beginning to crack and crumble around them.

“If you’d like to arrange a consultation, you can call my secretary,” Harvey disparages. “Otherwise, get the hell out of my firm.”

“Harvey, it’s me,” Mike pleads, pressing his hand to his chest. “Mike.”

Smirking, Harvey shakes his head, tossing the file in his hands into the air and walking away as the pages flutter down to the ground. “Have it your way. I’m calling the cops.”

“HARVEY—”

Mike’s eyes open suddenly, achingly, one of his arms desperately outstretched and the other mercilessly tangled in the bedsheets, a cold sweat drenching his forehead and the back of his neck. Darkness presses down around him, _everything’s fine, it was just a dream,_ okay, okay, alright, okay. He’s in bed, at home, in Seattle; Harvey’s probably in bed, at home, in New York, doing just fine. He remembers Mike. He does.

Of course he does.

Doesn’t he?

Before he can think better of it, Mike twists around, putting some small effort into not jostling Rachel where she lies beside him as he reaches for his phone on the bedside table. He gets as far as typing an “H,” his phone automatically trying to fill in Harvey’s name and number, before the darkness closes in again; what the hell is he doing, it’s gotta be four in the morning back there.

Mike looks wearily at the screen, Harvey’s name and number printed there as though he doesn’t know them both by heart. Maybe he’ll call him tomorrow, in the light of day, when everything is real and sane.

Mike sets his phone down and lies flat on his back. Maybe sleep will come, if he’s patient.

 

**_II_ **

Visitor’s badge pinned proudly to his lapel, Mike swaggers out of the elevators onto the fiftieth floor, up to the reception desk with a delighted smile on his face, his cheeks aching from the force of it. He hasn’t been here in such a long time, but this place is so familiar; same marble-patterned walls, same honey-colored wood, same blue frosted glass.

The receptionist looks up at him with a dull mask on her dull face.

“Welcome to the offices of Specter Litt, who is expected to retrieve you?”

Retrieve him?

“Harvey Specter,” he says, still smiling wide.

“Yes, please.”

He waits for her to pick up the phone, maybe press a buzzer; instead she’s stopped moving entirely, her gaze fixing on the back wall where Harvey’s and Louis’s names are mounted in delicate steel, and Mike takes an uncertain turn to the right.

“Hey, asshole, either give me some good news or get the fuck out of my way.”

Mike looks up at Alex Williams glaring furiously at him, clicking his tongue and shoving past Mike without pause.

“Hi Alex,” Mike says perplexedly, “nice to see you again.”

Alex merely continues walking—storming, really, a single scrap of paper clutched in his hand and a smudge of dirt on the back of his suit between his shoulder blades.

Mike shakes his head, smiling brightly as he continues down the hall to the right.

“I hope he never comes back here.”

“He won’t if he knows what’s good for him.”

Louis and Donna stand in Louis’s office with their backs to Mike as they stare out the window, their arms crossed in front of them and their hips angled identically to the left. Pressing his hand to the door, Mike leans in to hear better as Donna shakes her head.

“This is all Harvey’s fault.”

Mike startles a bit, and Louis nods.

“We wouldn’t be in this mess if he’d never hired that kid in the first place.”

The pressure in Mike’s cheeks lessens as the last traces of his smile fade away.

“We don’t deserve any of this.”

“Wherever he is now, I hope he’s miserable.”

Mike backs away from the office, letting the door fall shut. He never meant for any of this to happen, don’t they know that? He tried his best! He wished them well!

“I never should’ve hired you.”

Merely a hair’s breadth away, Harvey appears out of thin air, glaring, livid, murderous, his fists clenched at his sides and his shoulders drawn back and fire in his eyes the likes of which Mike has never seen before. Mike opens his mouth to say—something, an apology, a plea for understanding, an explanation, but before he can make a sound, Harvey clutches his throat tight, forcing him back, back against the wall, underneath the mounted names, _Zane Gordon Wheeler._

“I never wanted you to come back here.”

Mike grasps at Harvey’s hand, scratching at his skin, but Harvey only narrows his eyes and squeezes tighter.

“ _You ruined my life._ ”

“I’m sorry!”

“THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!”

Mike wakes with a strangled gasp, his fingers twitching over the bedcovers as his eyes spring open wide; before he thinks better of it, before he thinks of doing anything at all, he’s snatched his phone and dialed, the timer ticking up, _00:01, 00:02, ring, ring—_

Tapping frantically, he ends the call before it begins, dropping back to the mattress with his arm flung over his forehead, his phone knocking against his temple as his other arm settles across his stomach; Rachel turns toward him in her sleep, making a soft humming sound and tucking her hands underneath her head.

Mike pants, his rattling breath warming his chapped lips, slipping in under the peeling skin, boiling his blood as he raises the phone up above his head and looks at the glowing screen. Harvey will see the missed call tomorrow morning; maybe he’ll wonder what happened, maybe he’ll think something is wrong. Maybe he’ll assume it was an accident; maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll try to call Mike back; maybe he won’t.

Bending his elbow at an awkward angle, Mike sets the phone down on the bedside table and folds his hands over his ribs. Maybe sleep will come, if he stops thinking about it.

 

**_III_ **

The sky is bright blue, not a single cloud as far as the eye can see; in the distance, far, far away, a jet plane engine hums, flying off to some far-off country, maybe an island in the middle of the ocean. Mike looks up for the vapor trail and knows unquestionably that the plane is flying to Boston, ferrying precisely one hundred passengers, fifty short of capacity, nonstop, one hour and twenty-seven minutes.

Sitting on the church steps with his hands folded on his knees, he looks down at the road where the cars continue to pull in, rolling over bouquet after bouquet of flowers clogging up the driveway. They’re cutting it awfully close, these well-wishers; it’s a little rude.

“I like the white ones best.”

Mike closes his eyes and drops his neck down low.

“Don’t try to make me go in.”

Donna hums melodically.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

He regrets being here at all.

“How did this happen?”

She smiles and rubs her hand up and down his back.

“It’s just one of those things.”

That’s a terrible excuse.

“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he seethes. “Why didn’t _he_ tell me?”

“Oh, Mike,” she says exasperatedly, “you know he didn’t want you to see him like this.”

“But _why?_ ”

“Oh, Mike,” she says pitifully, “you know he never wanted to speak to you again.”

You know he hates you for what you’ve done.

“I thought I was making it easier for all of us.”

Rachel scoffs, appearing out of nowhere just for the privilege of turning her back on him.

“Look how well that turned out,” she snipes.

He knows, he knows. His wounds are washed in salt water and vinegar, and there’s no use in trying to heal them because it only makes the cuts deeper.

“You broke him, you know,” Donna soothes, stroking her hand through his hair. “You ruined him when you arrived and you killed him when you left.”

“You ruin everything you touch,” Rachel comments, examining her razor-sharpened nails.

“I know,” he mumbles into the ground, his face pressed into the dirt by the boot on his neck, whose is it, who knows, maybe his, it doesn’t matter. “I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“That’s not good enough,” Donna chides, kneeling beside him. “You’ve lost it all, Mike, there’s no coming back.”

“But I was trying—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rachel murmurs, her face bent close to his as she whispers in his ear. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

He wakes all at once, bursting through the surface of the water to gasp air back into his lungs, choking on the dirt as he scrambles for his phone on the bedside table, his fingers dialing Harvey’s number before he can think twice, pressing the phone to his ear by reflex rather than good sense.

“Hello?”

Alive! Harvey is alive, clear-headed and curious and answering Mike’s call, and alive, alive, thank god, he’s alive.

“Harvey?”

“Uh…yeah,” Harvey says carefully. “Mike?”

“Are you okay?”

Harvey makes that humming breathing sound he makes when he’s confused and Mike envisions him perfectly, the furrow in his brow and the thinning of his lips.

“I’m fine, Mike,” Harvey says. “Are _you_ okay? Why are you calling, is something wrong? Is everything alright?”

Rachel huffs an irate sigh in her sleep; Mike crawls out of bed, walking tenderly to the bathroom and shutting the door behind him.

“Everything’s fine,” he breathes. “Sorry I called you so late.”

“Mike, it’s seven AM here,” Harvey says. “I’m just about to go to work. What are you doing up at four in the morning?”

“I—”

Had a bad dream.

Mike rubs his fist against his eye and squints out the bathroom window. That must’ve been it. Yes, of course; he has them every now and again, more nights than not, and he should be used to it by now. He always wakes up, come morning, and everything is always the way he left it when he went to bed.

I had a bad dream, and I called to make sure you’re still alive.

“Nothing,” he says instead. “Sorry.”

“No, no,” Harvey assures him, “don’t worry about it. I haven’t heard from you in awhile, that’s all; how’s everything in Seattle?”

“Good,” Mike blurts out, “good, everything’s going great, everything’s fine.”

Harvey pauses.

“You sure about that?”

Yes. No. I mean, I… I…

“It’s not what I was expecting,” Mike says. “That’s all.”

“Mm-hm,” Harvey murmurs. “Great, though, everything’s going great?”

Satire? Was that sarcasm? Mike squints out the bathroom window; it’s too early for this, it’s too dark outside.

“Awesome,” he says. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“Call me—”

Mike hangs up and drops his phone into the sink, kneeling down on the tile floor and curling up on the bathmat. He has to be up in three and a half hours to go to work; maybe sleep will come, if he holds very still.

 

**_IV_ **

“So I start a week from Monday?” Mike says quite unintentionally as he breezes into Harvey’s office. He could’ve sworn the words on the tip of his tongue were closer to “Good morning,” or “How’s the deal going with Baxter,” or something else of some minor relevance.

“Mike,” Harvey marvels, looking up from the stacks upon stacks of paper piled around his desk. “What are you doing here?”

Mike grins cheekily. “I was in the neighborhood.” Reaching out, he nudges Harvey’s shoulder. “Come on, I called you the other day. Lunch date? You and me, one o’clock? Ringing any bells?”

Wincing, Harvey pushes the papers in front of him off to the side, off the edge of the desk onto the floor and into the garbage. “I’m sorry, Mike, but I’m busy today.”

“Busy?” Mike fumbles. “But, but when I called, you said—”

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Harvey interrupts him gently, “but we’ve all been very busy since you left. No one knows who’s in charge anymore, and I had a hard time finding your replacement.”

A sound echoes in Mike’s brain like cracking glass, a mirror splitting in two.

“My…replacement?”

Harvey nods sadly.

“You’re not coming back, Mike,” he reminds him. “It’s time.”

He said as much, didn’t he? On his wedding day, weren’t those his parting words? They were, they were, this is his own goddamn fault.

“But I didn’t mean _never,_ ” he pleads, and Harvey shakes his head.

“I want reliable people,” he laments, “people who aren’t going to be carried away.”

“I’m reliable!” Mike cries. “I’m… I’m reliable!”

Harvey sighs.

“You’re not, though,” he says. “You’re not and you know it.”

“But… I…”

“Mike,” Harvey placates him, “it’s okay. We knew from the start that it wasn’t going to last forever.”

But don’t we deserve something more than _this?_

Grasping desperately, grasping at nothing, Mike searches for something, anything, some reason, some rationale, please, please let this not be how it ends, please, _please_ give me a little more time, just another day, another hour, another _minute—_

“It’s time, Mike,” Harvey repeats, standing slowly. “It’s time.”

“But Harvey!”

Harvey shakes his head again.

“Come on, Mike. I’ll walk you out.”

“Harvey!”

Mike wakes with a rough scratching sensation in his throat; he must have been shouting in his sleep, though the noise probably didn’t wake Rachel, who’s shut the bedroom door and exiled him to the living room sofa for one reason or another. She won’t harangue him about the noise, then, come morning, so that’s nice. He coughs a few times in a flimsy effort to balm the sting, but it only makes him feel worse.

His cell phone on the coffee table informs him that it’s nearly eight o’clock, and he remembers belatedly that the firm is closed today, it being Sunday, and he probably deserves the rest.

Harvey’s probably been awake for hours.

Falling back against the sofa’s armrest, Mike lays his arm across his forehead and sighs up at the ceiling. There’s really no point in resisting it.

“Mike!”

He smiles impulsively.

“Hey,” he says. “How’ve you been?”

“You want me to be honest with you?” Harvey cautions, and Mike laughs softly.

“Yeah, of course.”

“I think I’m going crazy.”

Pushing the blankets tossed haphazardly over his legs down to the floor, Mike sits up and tucks his feet into the rumpled pile. “What’s wrong?” he asks nervously.

Harvey sighs, and Mike hears the soft creaking noise the chairs at his kitchen island make when he sits in them too roughly.

“Wheeler’s making another move for a managing partner position,” Harvey explains, “and I don’t know what deal they’ve got going on, but Zane’s backing her play, and I’ll tell you, Mike…sometimes I don’t even know why I stick around this place.”

“Because you love it,” Mike reminds him immediately. “Corporate law is in your blood, Harvey, you’re the best closer in the city.”

Harvey makes a pleased humming sound; Mike imagines him resting his elbow on the island, the phone pressed to his ear as he cradles his head in his hand, and finds that he misses him something awful.

“I’m not sure that’s gonna cut it anymore,” Harvey admits. “This firm, it—it’s become a place I don’t recognize. A place that doesn’t feel like home. You know what I mean?”

Looking around the living room at the light filtering in through the closed gossamer curtains and illuminating the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, the hallway leading to the closed bedroom door where Rachel sleeps alone in their king-size bed, Mike tries to remember the last time he felt like he really belonged somewhere, the last time he felt like he was where he was meant to be.

Turning slightly, he slides across the sofa to the opposite armrest, dragging the blankets off the floor with his foot and cuddling them up to his chest as he lies down.

“I think I do.”

Harvey chuckles under his breath.

“I think you had the right idea,” he says, “getting out while the getting was good. A real cut-and-run job.”

Mike closes his eyes and sinks down lower.

“Harvey…”

“I’m kidding,” Harvey assures him, “don’t worry about it.”

“You’re right,” Mike argues, “you’re right, I did, I left you right when you needed me the most, I left you without any warning when Robert was coming for your throat, and it wasn’t fair, and I shouldn’t have done it, and I.”

He blinks his eyes open.

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Harvey doesn’t speak.

Mike holds his breath and waits.

For a moment, time stands still.

Then Harvey sighs, shattering the illusion, and Mike comes back to life.

“What happened, Mike?” he asks. “We used to have goals, you remember that? We used to have dreams, we used to _aspire_ to things, we used to _fight_ for things, and now we just… Now we just fight to stop people from hurting us, now we fight to stay in place.” He laughs again, a hollower sound, and Mike imagines him shaking his head.

“What happened to us?”

Mike would answer, except that he doesn’t know.

“Forget it,” Harvey says then, “it’s just been a rough couple of months.”

“It’s been a rough year,” Mike amends, and Harvey sighs again.

“It’s good to hear from you.”

Mike hums.

 

**_V_ **

Here lie the remains of Zane Specter Litt LLC, formerly Specter Litt, formerly Pearson Specter Litt, formerly Pearson Specter, formerly Pearson Darby Specter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Mike stands in the rubble and the ruin, turning in wild circles as he casts about for someone, anyone, please, tell me what happened here, what’s going on, what have I stumbled into. What have I broken beyond repair.

Everything. You’ve broken all of it. All of us.

“I’m sorry!”

Everything you love has turned to dust.

“I didn’t mean it!”

Do you ever?

Mike runs as hard and as fast as he can, jumping over the shattered pieces of the life he left behind—there’s his desk, and that one there was his lamp, and this chair was his chair—but purgatory is a mobius strip, an endless loop of reminders of his failures, all the lives he’s ruined with his terrible, terrible mistakes.

“Mike, how could you do this to us?” Louis demands, and Mike shakes his head as he tries not to stumble.

“I didn’t think—”

“You never think, do you?” Donna reproaches, and Mike’s heel catches on the edge of the carpet and sends him tumbling to the ground.

“I was only trying—”

“I don’t have time for second best,” Harvey snaps, and Mike cowers under his vicious glare.

You shouldn’t have come here.

“We’re all better off without you.”

Mike isn’t sure which of them spits the pronouncement, but it doesn’t matter who because they’re right, they’re right, he’s the worst thing that could ever have happened to that firm, the worst thing that ever could have happened to any of them, to all of them, to Harvey. Don’t they know that he’d take it all back if he could? That he’d do anything to travel back in time, to give them all their lives the way they were meant to be?

“I don’t give a _shit,_ ” Harvey barks. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty for everyone, Mike, you don’t get special treatment for figuring out that you made a mistake _eight years later!_ ”

“Please,” he begs, “there has to be something I can do.”

“You can leave and never come back!”

Mike jolts awake, nearly falling off the bench where he sits, reaching for his phone and dialing Harvey’s number instinctively, mechanically, without question. Of course this is how these things go; who ever had any doubts?

“Mike?”

He smiles; Harvey always answers so quickly.

“Hey.” He takes a deep breath and sets his feet on the floor. “You got a minute?”

“Of course,” Harvey says promptly. “What’s wrong, are you okay?”

In a manner of speaking.

“Rachel and I split up.”

Harvey lapses into silence. Mike doesn’t mind; he’d be confused, too. He still is, kind of.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harvey says eventually. Mike nods.

“Thanks.”

Harvey pauses again, and Mike waits for the question he knows is coming up next. Well, one of two; either Harvey will ask what he wants to, or he’ll ask what he thinks he should.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Split the difference, that’s good too.

“A lot of little things,” Mike says. “A lot of little things, and then a couple of bigger things.” He rubs his hand across his mouth and wonders where to begin; well, it’s not as though the first retelling has to be perfect. This won’t be the last time, after all.

“At first it was just the usual stuff,” he hedges, “like disagreeing about what to do on the weekend, or I was spending too much time on work, or she was spending too much time on school, or shit like that.”

“Sounds pretty big already,” Harvey muses, and Mike chuckles.

“I guess.”

“But there was bigger stuff?”

Bigger, yeah. Mike sighs.

“No one knows us out here,” he says. “No one knows anything about our history, about how long we’ve been together, or how many times we’ve broken up; they know we’re a couple, they know we’re married, they just take our word for it and move on.” He sniffs derisively. “No one gives a shit, you know? We’re not defying company policy, we’re not sneaking around in the file room; she’s not proving her loyalty by dating a fraud or sitting around waiting for me to get out of prison, I’m not trying to win over her father or stand by her after she cheated on me. We’re just…together.”

Harvey murmurs understandingly, and Mike rubs his palm against his eye.

“There was this suit,” he starts over. “The US distributor of a Russian auto manufacturer was falsifying the records for their safety standards, and we knew it, everybody knew it, the class action was like…six thousand plaintiffs, and one of the senior partners and I were working on it twenty-four seven, basically. This thing was a big fucking deal, I mean, people had _died,_ a _lot_ of people, and I wanted to really hit it out of the park, you know? One of my first big cases, I wanted to do right by these people. I wanted to show them that they could trust me.”

“Of course you did, you’re Mike Ross.”

Mike laughs suddenly, a strange thickness in the back of his throat; if he didn’t know better, he would fear he was about to start crying. No, that would be silly. This is fine, everything is fine.

“So I,” he carries on, “I get home late one night, and it’s not like that’s unusual or anything, I’ve been getting home late every night since this thing started, but the first thing Rachel says to me is that she wants to get rid of the carpet in the living room.”

Harvey grunts a disbelieving laugh, and he’s right, he’s absolutely right, this is weak and petty and stupid; Mike knew it then and he knows it now, but isn’t that the point? Shouldn’t he have seen this coming? Shouldn’t they all?

“And I mean I don’t _really_ care about the carpet,” he admits, “but I picked it out, when we were furnishing the apartment; she’d narrowed it down to like, three, and I picked this one, and now all of a sudden she can’t stand it anymore, she wants to throw it out. So I ask her why she went with it the first time around, and she says she thought I really wanted it, she didn’t want to take that away from me, and I tell her I don’t give a shit, and suddenly she accuses me of not carrying my weight in this relationship, she says I’m spending too much time at work, and I haven’t asked her how school is going in months, and I don’t care about her as a person, just about what she can do for the firm; and I tell her the whole point of moving out here was to work at this firm, was to help these people who need us, and…”

And we should have known better.

Harvey waits, and Mike listens to the ambient noise of the world carrying on around him.

Everything is moving along.

“We took our relationship for granted,” he says, leaning over his lap and looking down at the floor. “We did what everyone else did, we assumed we would always be together no matter what, that we were meant for each other and everything would just happen the way it was supposed to. We forgot that our lives are hard, that our work is hard, that whatever…couple-y fantasy we might’ve had probably wasn’t going to happen right away, or ever, and what we did have… It wasn’t enough.”

Harvey waits for him to go on, humming an agreeable sound when he doesn’t.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks. “You have somewhere to go?”

Mike clears his throat. “I spent the last couple nights at a hotel, but I’ve got another place lined up.”

“Yeah? You need any help? Need me to call anybody?”

Harvey’s making a good effort to sound upbeat; it’s kind of him, it really is. Mike smiles to himself.

“I might,” he hedges. “But actually right now I have to go; I’ll call you again later?”

“Of course; you sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah.” Mike glances up, slightly to the left. “It’s just that my plane is starting to board.”

“Your—”

“I’ll talk to you later!”

 

**_+I_ **

Waking from a gentle doze, Mike blinks at the clock on the bedside table; a few minutes past midnight, more or less as he expected. Groping for his phone, he dials the number from memory and presses it to his ear, closing his eyes again.

“Mike, hi.”

“Hi, yourself. Are you really still at work?”

Harvey scoffs. “Of course I am. You know, starting up a new firm isn’t as hard as your pal Andy made it seem.”

“And yet, it’s midnight, and you’re still at work.”

“Sure, because I’m doing it _right._ ”

Mike smiles, raising his free hand to massage the back of his neck. “You’re doing fine,” he says. “Whatever you’re working on, just hand it off to Louis and come home.”

“Sheesh,” Harvey chides, “you’re the most controlling boyfriend I’ve ever been affiliated with.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.” Mike hears a soft clicking sound as Harvey shuts his laptop. “Alright, fine. I’m on my way, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes."

Turning his head, Mike glances at the clock again. “I’ll try not to fall asleep.”

“As long as you’re ready for your meeting with Consumer Federation tomorrow about the Lidoderm thing, you can sleep as much as you want.”

“Love you too.”

“See you soon.”

Ending the call, Mike drops his phone next to the clock and turns his face into Harvey’s pillow beside him. He’ll be back soon.

Mike can wait up.

**Author's Note:**

> “The white ones are best.”  
> “You’re just here to make me go in.”  
> “I am. Because sometimes we make choices we’re not old enough to make, and then we regret them. I don’t want that to happen to you.”  
> “Why would I regret not going into that place?”  
> “‘Cause it’s a chance to say good-bye to your parents.”  
> “I already missed that.”  
> —Father Walker and Mike, [Faith](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e10)” (s05e10)
> 
> “You’re going to start a week from Monday.”  
> —Harvey, “[Pilot](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s01e01)” (s01e01)
> 
> “We’re not coming back, Harvey. Rachel and I were offered a chance to run a firm in Seattle… It’s time, Harvey. It’s time.”  
> —Mike, “[Good-Bye](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s07e16)” (s07e16)
> 
> “Give this job to Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren’t going to be carried away. I mean, we’re not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks…”  
> —Don Corleone, _The Godfather_ (1972)
> 
> “Sheesh! You’re the most paranoid family I’ve ever been affiliated with.”  
> —Homer Simpson, “Lisa the Skeptic” (s09e08), _The Simpsons_
> 
>  _The Godfather_ is the first movie reference Mike and Harvey share, in “Pilot,” when Mike says he “feels like Michael Corleone in that scene where that fat guy teaches him how to shoot a gun” and Harvey says he’s “not the fat guy.”
> 
> “How’s the deal going with Baxter” is a reference to Kurt Baxter, the man Mike and Harvey tried to deal with on Teddy Doyle’s behalf in “Inevitable” (s07e13).
> 
> “Your pal Andy” is a reference to Andy Forsyth, the guy who offered Mike the job in Seattle in “Tiny Violin” (s07e15).
> 
> [Consumer Federation](https://consumerfed.org/) is an association of non-profit consumer organizations with the intention of protecting consumers’ best interests.


End file.
